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airman feeding nickels into the one-armed bandit. “Last thing I’d want to do after a shift is bond with another machine,” she says to Bob. The man at the slot is intense, committed, addicted. At least he’s only losing nickels.
    The war on terror, what was once known as Operation Enduring Freedom, has lost its official name. On the base they call it Operation Expanding Waistline, partly because covert snacking is the main pastime during shifts at a drone monitor. What she and the members of her squadron do, all day and night, is a high-tech version of a detective stakeout. They watch. They wait. They don’t sit in unmarked cars or vans but in single- wide trailers. Yet unlike a stakeout, there is no scenery, only images on monitors. The same desert or mountain for hours. At first being an eye in the sky thrills. But a cop gets to pound on a door and make a bust. For UAV drivers, the rare instance of firing a missile, what Jessica’s squadron calls an angel, makes the adrenaline flow to no purpose. She’s just pulling a switch. And this is why Colonel Voigt has pinned sergeant stripes and his hopes on her: he’s decided that women are more adaptable to this type of mission. He thinks they have patience. He thinks they will be the ones to save the drone program because they won’t go nickel-slot-machine crazy like the men.
    â€œHey, killer,” a familiar voice calls to Jessica. Lieutenant Dunbar, entering with his crew, is dark, handsome, cocky—a real top-gun wannabe. He had logged two hundred hours in his father’s Piper before enlisting to be a jet pilot and astigmatism shot him down. But you don’t need much depth perception to drive a drone.
    Jessica absorbs Dunbar’s mandatory rib. Word is spreading about the al-Yarisi kill because someone in Washington decided to let the world know another terrorist has died in a drone strike. If the triggers on these operations were not anonymous, Jessica might have become famous for taking out Al Qaeda’s number three. This makes her Dunbar’s competition. The lieutenant has let it be known, discreetly since what they do is even internally classified, that he has been the trigger in a dozen operations where angels flew or demons dropped—a demon being a laser-guided five-hundred-pound bomb. Dunbar is the base’s unofficial drone ace, if there can be such a thing.
    â€œDon’t call her that,” Bob says to Dunbar.
    â€œI know he’s your man, but I didn’t know you two were married.” Dunbar says to Jessica, and Bob’s face goes red. Bob
is
her partner, her sensor operator, but that’s as far as it goes.
    â€œThe fuck we’re married, sir,” she tells the lieutenant.
    Now Dunbar really notices her. Jessica imagines what he is studying and to her it is not impressive—a pale face, wispy brown hair trimmed short, insubstantial nose, eyes naively large. In warning, Dunbar points a finger at her. Then he snatches back his hand and heads for the bar.
    â€œYou’re going to lose those new stripes,” Bob says.
    Jessica shrugs.
    Pancho’s serves Pabst, peanuts, pretzels—apparently whatever starts with a
p
. The owner is actually not a Pancho but a Phyllis, the ex-wife of an ex-airman named Frank who ran off to Cuernavaca in the eighties. Phyl could serve as a standing advertisement for the American Cancer Society. Her voice is an infrequent rasp and her skin a roadmap folded too many times. She is huffing through what might be anywhere from her forty- seventh to her seventy-seventh year. But everyone knows not to suggest she give up her Lucky Strikes—that would lead to immediate ejection.
    Dunbar’s mouth is curved in a way that Jessica likes. In fact, she likes his whole silhouette. She is watching Phyl fix a shot glass for him from a bottle of wormy tequila kept under the bar. She stares as Dunbar knocks it back. Then he speaks some quiet words to his